Christies Life

Christie's Life

"One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is to have a happy childhood. I had a very happy childhood."

Agatha Christie

"One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is to have a happy childhood. I had a very happy childhood."

So reads the opening sentences in Agatha Christie's autobiography which she wrote between the ages of 60 and 75. The biography below draws on Agatha Christie's own recollections of her life but also the official published biographies by Laura Thompson and Janet Morgan.

childhood

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on 15 September 1890 in Torquay, Devon, South West England into a comfortably well off middle class family.

Her story, in her own words and now in her own voice. This new release of Agatha Christie's autobiography includes a CD of the famous voice recordings she dictated forty years ago that were only discovered in 2008. Spread over fourteen tracks the CD contains over an hour's worth of material revealing the normally reclusive Agatha telling her own story in a lively, spontaneous and often conspiratorial way, whose passion in talking about her life is captured in the printed autobiography.

Published a year after Agatha Christie's death, her autobiography tells of her fascinating private life, from early childhood through two marriages and two world wars, and her experiences both as a writer and on archaeological expeditions with her second husband, Max Mallowan. Not only does the book reveal the true genius of her legendary success, but the story is vividly told and as captivating as one of her novels.

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Other stories in this collection

A passionate and accomplished writer, Laura Thompson has turned her highly acclaimed biographical skills to Agatha Christie, arguably the greatest crime writer in the world.

Thompson describes the Edwardian world in which Christie grew up; explores the relationships she had, including those with her two husbands and daughter; and investigates the mysteries still surrounding Christie's life, including her disappearance in 1926.
For the first time, Christie’s six Mary Westmacott romance novels, written under a pseudonym and highly revelatory about her hidden inner life, are fully studied in a biography.

Agatha Christie is a mystery and writing about her is a detection job in itself. But, with access to all of Christie's letters, papers, and writing notebooks, as well as interviews with her grandson, daughter, son-in-law, and their living relations, Thompson is able to unravel not only the detailed workings of Christies detective fiction, but the truth behind her private life as well.

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Agatha Christie's memoirs about her travels to Syria and Iraq in the 1930s with her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan.
Agatha Christie was already well known as a crime writer when she accompanied her husband, Max Mallowan, to Syria and Iraq in the 1930s.

She took enormous interest in all his excavations, and when friends asked what her strange life was like, she decided to answer their questions in this delightful book.
First published in 1946, Come, Tell Me How You Live is now reissued in trade paperback format. It gives a charming picture of Agatha Christie herself, and is, as Jacquetta Hawkes concludes in her Introduction, 'a pure pleasure to read'.